Friday, May 3, 2013

What's Next?

Future Looking

Often my five-year-old son says to me, “What's next, Dad?; what are we going to do now?” This simple phrase and the thought process behind it is infused with all kinds of meaning; it suggests, at least to me, how we humans think. We are essentially forward looking, and want to know what the future holds.

We might look to the past for clues, but it’s often a method to find out what we plan to do next. Or in the case of reading history, to learn from the past, its mistakes, and move forward with the idea that we can avoid these human errors—always a difficult endeavour.

Progress, whatever you might think of the word, is as natural for humanity as is breathing and eating. Those that doubt or even fear progress are, to a great degree, doubting the future. Since the future is unknown, the proposition of an unknown future can scare people. Some take comfort in reading accounts of the past, the history of humanity.

Yet, there is a growing interest in what is now called Big Data, which is to collect large amounts of data to come to some kind of view of human trends: In a recent column (“What's You'll Do Next”) in the New York Times, David Brooks explains both its appeal and its limitations:

The theory of big data is to have no theory, at least about human nature. You just gather huge amounts of information, observe the patterns and estimate probabilities about how people will act in the future.

As Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier write in their book, “Big Data,” this movement asks us to move from causation to correlation. People using big data are not like novelists, ministers, psychologists, memoirists or gossips, coming up with intuitive narratives to explain the causal chains of why things are happening. “Contrary to conventional wisdom, such human intuiting of causality does not deepen our understanding of the world,” they write.

Instead, they aim to stand back nonjudgmentally and observe linkages: “Correlations are powerful not only because they offer insights, but also because the insights they offer are relatively clear. These insights often get obscured when we bring causality back into the picture.”

The huge collection of data is essentially a collection of individual historical events and the establishment of patterns or trends in human actions; this, however, is not the same as establishing cause and effect, which is far more complicated. History is important; and I have read much history, but it's a logical fallacy to think that history (always) informs the future. This is deterministic; this is nonsense, of course. As is the idea that current trends will continue indefinitely.

It just takes one event, one disjunction by one human to change the course of history, and then as the saying goes, “all bets are off.” Wars, natural disasters, economic downturns, political instability cannot easily be predicted. Here's why: humans, despite the thinking of mathematicians, analysts and economists, are not the same as machines. Of course, such individuals would like it to be so, heavily invested in their models and theories, blind to human emotions and unpredictably. Sorry to disappoint. Some humans value their individuality and like to confound mathematical models.

More important, humanity has changed course too many times; there are too many factors in how humans arrive at decisions; and the future, despite the claims of mathematical models and “powerful” algorithms. Big Data cannot yet accurately predict the future, although it might hold some narrow use for marketing analysts, retailers and sellers of consumer products for smaller issues of concern, e.g., what kind of consumer products are in vogue, and in what geographical areas are they being purchased. Data points and information are not the same as knowledge.

For the larger, more important socio-economic and political issues that shape society, its use is both limited and over-stated. Without getting into the philosophical arguments of determinism and indeterminism, humans need shape their own destiny without the baggage of too much information.

So, in answer to my son, “Let's find out together what's next.” It might not be so bad; in fact, it might be fun.

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Yiddish Sites (listed since August 2017)

There are dozens of sites dedicated to Yiddish language, culture and music. Here are some that I have found noteworthy. I will add to the list regularly. If you have a Yiddish site or know of one, please do not hesitate to contact me atpjgreenbaum@gmail.com:

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Afn Shvel(“On the Threshold”), a magazine published by the League for Yiddish, dating to 1941, it is committed to the promotion and preservation of the Yiddish language and culture. It published two double issues a year. Its editor-in-chief is Sheva Zucker;

American Jewish Archive at Hebrew Union College’s Jewish Institute of Religion contains more than 10 million pages of documents. manuscripts, genealogical materials, as well as thousands of audiovisual recordings, photographs, microfilm and digital collections;

Center for Jewish History, in New York City, has 5 miles of archival material (in dozens of languages), more than 500,000 volumes, as well asthousands of artworks, textiles, ritual objects, recordings and photographs;

JewishGen Yizkor Book Project, a database of more than 1,000 yizkor books worldwide, a good number of them have been translated from Hebrew and Yiddish into English;

Language and Cultural Atlas of Ashkenazic Jews,from Columbia University,consists of 5,755 hours of audio tape interviews with Yiddish-speaking Jews from Central and eastern Europe, done between 1959 and 1972 along with around 100,000 pages of linguistic field notes;

Lexilogos, a compilation of Yiddish online resources, including dictionaries, grammar books, and a translation of the Torah (Toyre) in Yiddish;

Milken Archive of Jewish Music, a record of the American Jewish Experience; since 1990, it has become the largest collection of American Jewish music with about 600 recorded works, including a number in Yiddish;

Museum of the Yiddish Theatre, an online museum originating in New York City and founded by Dr. Steven Lasky, has in its collection such items as photographs, theatre programs, sheet music, audio recordings and other documents of some importance and historical significance;

Pakn Treger, (“itinerant bookseller in Eastern Europe who traveled from shtetl to shtetl ”), the magazine of the Yiddish Book Centre;

Recorded Sound Archives (RSA) of Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton contains more than 100,000 recordings of music, a great many in Yiddish;

Songs of My People, a site by Josephine Yalovitser dedicated to Yiddish songs of mourning and of joy;

The National Center For Jewish Film, based at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., is the home to 15,000 reels of feature films, documentaries, newsreels, home movies and institutional films, dating from 1903 to the present; this effort has led to the revival of Yiddish cinema;

Yizkor Book Collection at the New York Public Library provide a documentation of daily life, through essays and photographs and the memoralizing of murdered residents, of Jewish communities destroyed in the Holocaust. Of the 750 yizkor books in its collection, 618 have been digitalized. Most yizkor books are in Yiddish or Hebrew;

YUNG YiDiSH, a site dedicated to preserving and promoting Yiddish culture in Israel;